The use of touch-sensitive surfaces as input devices for computers and other electronic computing devices has increased significantly in recent years. Exemplary touch-sensitive surfaces include touch pads and touch screen displays. Such surfaces are widely used to manipulate user interface objects on a display.
Exemplary manipulations include selecting and/or performing one or more actions on one or more user interface objects, such as scrolling one or more objects. Exemplary user interface objects include text, digital images, icons, and other graphics. For portable devices with small displays, these objects may need to be scrolled to view various portions of an object.
One type of scrolling is marquee scrolling, in which text, images, and/or other objects scroll as if they were on a marquee. For example, in a handheld portable media player, marquee scrolling may be used to view file names and other information about the content on the player.
But existing methods for performing marquee scrolling are cumbersome and inefficient. For example, it may be unclear to a user what action(s) is/are required to perform marquee scrolling, which creates a significant cognitive burden on a user. In addition, existing methods take longer than necessary, thereby wasting energy. This latter consideration is particularly important in battery-operated devices.